We followed a signpost off the side road out of Lacoste and along a track through the scrub oak toward the open countryside. It didn't look like a light industrial zone, and we were just about to turn back when we nearly fell into it-a huge hole bitten out of the ground, littered with blocks of stone. Some were raw, some worked into tombstones, memorials, giant garden urns, winged angels with intimidating blind stares, small triumphal arches, or stocky round columns. Tucked away in a corner was a hut, its windows opaque with years of quarry dust.

We knocked and went in, and there was Pierrot. He was shaggy, with a wild black beard and formidable eyebrows. A piratical man. He made us welcome, beating the top layer of dust from two chairs with a battered trilby hat which he then placed carefully over the telephone on the table.

"English, eh?"

We nodded, and he leaned toward us with a confidential air.

"I have an English car, a vintage Aston Martin. Magnifique."

He kissed the tips of his fingers, speckling his beard with white, and poked among the papers on his table, raising puffs from every pile. Somewhere there was a photograph.

The phone started to make gravelly noises. Pierrot rescued it from under his hat and listened with an increasingly serious face before putting the phone down.

"Another tombstone," he said. "It's this weather. The old ones can't take the cold." He looked around for his hat, retrieved it from his head, and covered the phone again, hiding the bad news.